'Jerk' running for president

Sunday

Jan 8, 2012 at 2:00 AMJan 8, 2012 at 10:27 AM

Bob Ely calls himself “a jerk,” and he's running for president.

Elizabeth Dinan

Bob Ely calls himself “a jerk,” and he's running for president.

On Tuesday, he'll be listed as a Democratic candidate on New Hampshire's presidential primary ballot, but in the meantime, he said, he won't kiss babies, glad hand or give “rousing speeches full of vapid platitudes.

“If that's important to you,” Ely said, “vote for someone else.”

His campaign fliers were mailed during the past two weeks to 145,000 New Hampshire voters, including those in Portsmouth. On the front he asked, “Hey, primary voter ... Are you angry enough to vote for a jerk?” On the reverse, Ely stated, “A jerk who will put people to work, raise taxes, slash spending, to pound our economy back into shape.”

The fliers direct voters to Ely's Web site, with a domain name that mirrors his campaign platform: www.workmorekeepless.com. If elected, the “shabby Democrat” from a Chicago suburb promises he'll “spend like a Republican and tax like a Democrat.”

He's shabby, he explained, because he's a lifelong independent who had to choose “between the lesser of two idiots” and “held his nose” while declaring as a Democrat.

Ely's chances of winning the Democratic nomination are “somewhere between slim and none,” he said, but nonetheless, he's spent $200,000 of his own cash for the fliers, some advertising and other campaign expenses.

Ely said he's “a private person who shuns the limelight,” but is spending his own money to run for president because, “I'm tired of (complaining) and moaning.”

He said he's angry “we're in such a mess” and that “the people who got us in this mess are still getting paid handsomely.”

A former financial adviser, Ely said he believes “our economy is going to spiral out of control, causing our country to become weak and sallow.

“We're on a course for financial Armageddon, which, as World War II followed the Great Depression, may lead to the real thing,” he said. “There are no safe havens. Not stocks, not bonds, certainly not gold, not Swiss bank accounts and definitely not money stuffed under the mattress.”

Ely said, while he worried about the economy, wars and the national debt, “it dawned on me. If Michele Bachmann can run for president, I can, too.”

“I'm inexperienced,” he reports on his Web site, while adding, “Washington is littered with experienced politicians. How's that working out for you?”

“I can be a jerk. Get over it,” is one of two dozen reasons Ely said voters have not to vote for him.

And when asked if he wants to be president, his answer is “hell no.”

“I didn't know what else to do,” he said about his unlikely presidential campaign.

By Friday, Ely's Web site had been visited “a couple thousand times,” numbers he called “clearly not enough for the effort.”

He bought ads in New Hampshire's largest newspaper, he said, but was never called by a reporter from that paper for an interview.

The current owner of some weekly newspapers in Missouri, Ely said, even his own newspapers, haven't interviewed him.

He said, unless there's “a miracle” on Tuesday, he'll stop spending to get his message out Wednesday. If he does “get some traction,” he said, the campaign will continue.

According to his Sept. 18, 1983, wedding announcement, published in the New York Times, he (born Robert Ely) and his wife, Alice Fairchild Moulton, both assumed the surname Moulton-Ely on their wedding day. Son of a lawyer and a newspaperwoman, Ely was born in 1958 and later, he said, transferred from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Yale after deciding he didn't have “the intellectual horsepower to be a standout engineer.”

At Yale, he said, “my academic achievements and alcohol consumption would have embarrassed ‘W.'”

Before he got into the newspaper business, Ely worked on Wall Street and later as a Chicago bond analyst, according to his Web site.

Advertise

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
seacoastonline.com ~ 111 New Hampshire Ave., Portsmouth, NH 03801 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service